The music often takes us like a sea
By Sylvain Fort
The Passeur, 146 p., €16.
The rating of L’Express: 4/5
Music often takes us like a sea, by Sylvain Fort
© / The passer
He confesses to not knowing music theory very well, and not practicing any instrument. Sylvain Fort is a simple listener, but with a rare gift: knowing how to write marvelously well on an art that nevertheless defies words. Biographer of Verdi, translator of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and contributor to all that France has of musical journals, our columnist signs an inspired little book on music mania. The book spins the Baudelairian metaphor of the ship: “Music takes you, and you don’t know where it is taking you. Quite quickly, however, a simple thing appears: if it takes you, it is with a firm hand, almost imperious. Its grip quickly becomes tight. It takes you where you never knew you could go.” Passengers can be reassured, Sylvain Fort is a wise captain. Like the late music critic and philosopher André Tubeuf, this normalien knows how to make good use of his humanities.
Under his pen, counterpoint becomes metaphysical, and Ninth Symphony of Beethoven a Promethean act. While The Passion according to Saint Matthew should today “be as foreign to us as a hieroglyph”, he explains how Bach’s sonic cathedral continues to touch our souls, regardless of our nationality or our relationship to religion. But for Sylvain Fort, it is silence that best defines music. The first chords of Tristan and Isolde have been talked about so much because they seem to come straight out of the abyss. And Im Abendrot from Richard Strauss to Evidence of Thelonious Monk, the greatest works are, according to him, those which are “on the verge of being silent”. Rammstein or Metallica lovers, go your way. Thomas Mahler
Magma No. 01art magazine
directed by Paul Olivennes.
Numbered edition, 224 p., 6O €.
The rating of L’Express: 4/5
Magma, magazine edited by Paul Olivennes
© / the presses of reality
Cloth cover, annual publication, Magma is a – very – beautiful book, “reviving the tradition of the great art magazines of the 20th century”, which appears for the first time this week. Under the audacious direction of Paul Olivennes, art gallery owner and companion of Suzanne Lindon (thank you very much), 80 works of art and literary texts, 18 artists assembled in pairs. Dialogues, correspondence, and surprises. Red majorettes grimacing in front of the gate of the Palace of Versailles under the lens of Luigi Ghirri, X-Ray disc engraved on a medical X-ray proposed by the sculptor Andra Ursuta, according to the so-called “Rock on Bones” process, thanks to which Romanian youth secretly listened to the forbidden hits of the Rolling Stones… Or, photographed by François Halard, the Sicilian palace of Prince Palagonia, this baroque masterpiece “where the absurdity of this bad taste is shown to the highest degree”, as wrote Goethe.
We smile with horror at the stroll of a pair of glasses, composed by Claude Nori, who showed it to his neighbor, Agnès Varda, the latter dedicating to him a text never published since 1976. What to remember from this profusion? When she was a child, Angélique Berès, the mother of Paul Olivennes, asked her godfather, the poet René Char: “How do words come to you? In 1982, he replied to her in a letter, reproduced here in facsimile: “As tears well up in the eyes then are born and crowd, so do the words, we must only keep them from crashing down like the tears. ” Emilie Lanez
The eye
by Claire Castillon.
Gallimard, 184 p., €19.
The rating of L’Express: 4/5
The eye
© / Gallimard
A young girl immobilized for life by the spectacle of a slowed-down choreography, an addicted teenager with all kinds of pacifiers, a woman who is consumed with love under the snow for a man who does not look at her, another who shoots one of his hairs until suspecting him of the worst… Let’s face it, the characters of Claire Castillon’s short stories are all more or less perched. Ordinarily bizarre, downright crazy or completely delirious, they share with us, thanks to impeccable interior monologues, their strange lucidity which takes us on board until the fall. The author, to whom we also owe excellent children’s books such as the vertiginous The lengths (Gallimard jeunesse), has, as we know, the art of detail, conciseness, simplicity and excels in these short formats where she skillfully deploys the intense singularity of her universe.
Absolutely prosaic, the stories of these beings are familiar to us as much as they worry us. We often smile, we are perplexed, we are troubled, we cannot help sympathizing with the characters despite the horror that some of them inspire. In short, a very successful collection, especially since each of the texts is followed by a short epilogue, a kind of second fall, which brings to the news an always surprising, sometimes cruel, often grating light. This Eye confronts us with infinite solitude as well as the absolute necessity, in order to survive it, of our little rites, of our illusions, even of our delusions. Leaves, when they fail, to resort to the worst. Pauline Leduc